Things to Do With Kids in Rockland on February 11

Find free and low-cost things to do with kids in Rockland today, February 11, including fun activities and events the whole family can enjoy. See what's going on today in Rockland's museums, galleries, and libraries for some educational fun; in the parks, for outdoor and nature activities; and in the theaters, for children's concerts and performances. Plus, get details and directions on any street fairs or holiday festivals happening February 11. For even more free and low-cost upcoming events in Rockland, check out our complete calendar of events.

Check out black bears, coyotes, beavers, otters, bald eagles, and other animals native to our area. Most of the zoo's outdoor residents were either orphaned and abandoned and would no longer be able to survive in the wild. Visitors can also warm up in the zoo's Reptile and Amphibian house, where kids can get an up-close view of frogs, turtles, snakes, salamanders and fish.

The tri-state area's youngest LEGO enthusiasts can enjoy special activities during Tot Tuesdays. Tot Tuesdays will take place every Tuesday, from 10am-2pm, at Ridge Hill in Yonkers. Little LEGO lovers and their parents can experience the attraction and enjoy events tailored for them.
Guests will also get to enjoy the attraction's range of interactive experiences, including its 4D cinema, two LEGO amusement rides and MINILAND, the venue's signature re-creation of landmark locations and buildings throughout Westchester County and New York City, made entirely out of LEGO bricks. Free Wi-Fi will be available for parents at the attraction.
LEGOLAND Discovery Center Westchester is a $12 million, 32,300-square-foot indoor attraction featuring more than 3 million LEGO bricks, geared towards children ages 3-10 and their families. Its range of educational and interactive attractions will include hands-on play areas, a 4D cinema, master classes led by Master Model Builders, two LEGO amusement rides, special party rooms, and MINILAND. To purchase tickets and annual passes, or for more information, visit legolanddiscoverycenter.com/westchester.
Tuesdays, Feb. 3, 10, 17, and 24 from 10am-2pm.

Not a rose, not a candy, but even better, it's a Compliment in time for Valentine's Day. Artist Leah Harper turns the everyday vending machine (with a long tradition of spewing out gumballs and tiny toys) into a Compliment dispensing marvel. Harper's interactive art piece, "Complimentary," will be installed in the Hudson River Museum Lobby.
Turn the knob on the dispenser and out comes your compliment in a plastic toy capsule, and for free! A container next to the dispenser lets you dispose of the plastic capsule for recycling. If you want to give a compliment, too, there will be a box close by in which to place it. Your submitted compliment will be incorporated into a spreadsheet of good words Harper gathers from submissions and online surveys. Her favorite compliment to date, "If you were a potato, you would be a sweet potato."
The Compliment dispenser first made its appearance this fall at New York City's Art in Odd Places festival, and its cheerful mission is the direct output from Harper's study of design for social causes at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work is also featured in Site95’s "Transforming New York Street Objects" and FIGMENT Festival NYC, making environments eventful and interesting, inviting you to join the fun.
Looking ahead, Harper says, "I want to do more work that makes people happy!"
Compliments do just that. Some samples from the Compliment Dispenser:
You Are the Mercedes-Benz of Caviar!
You've Certainly Gotten Enough Beauty Sleep!
That Smile Looks Beautiful on You!

One World One Sky: Big Bird's Adventure, features the beloved yellow-feathered friend from PBS's Sesame Street. In a show full of light and color, follow Big Bird and Elmo as they explore the night sky with Hu Hu Zhu, a friend from China. On a trip from Sesame Street to the moon, they discover that planets are different from another but people on Earth like the same things. More learning, too, about the Big Dipper, the North Star, the sun, and the moon. Appropriate for children ages 5 and older. See One World One Sky every Saturday and Sunday in February at 12:30pm.

Nyack's famous farm market moves indoors for the winter. Shop for gourmet baked good, coffee, locally-made wine and cheese, and more. The market will continue every Thursday except for Dec. 25 through March 2015.

One of history's greatest love stories and Lerner and Loewe's timeless masterpiece. King Arthur and his new queen, Guinevere, rule their kingdom with ideals of chivalry and peace, but the arrival of Sir Lancelot threatens the foundation of the realm in one of the most fabled love triangles of all time. Revel in the glorious music including, "If Ever I Would Leave You," "The Lusty Month of May," "How to Handle a Woman," "I Loved You Once in Silence," and "What Do the Simple Folk Do?". Directed and choreographed by Broadway's Richard Sabellico, this new, intimate production focuses on the dynamic, rich, and intense characters in this most regal of American musicals. Jan. 29 through Apr. 5.

This seasonal market enters its 7th season and is open every Saturday through May 16. Shop for fresh fish, vegetables, dairy products, meat, eggs, honey, herbs, bakery items, soups, prepared foods and locally-made artisinal products. Join the e-mail list for weekly updates and for more information: PCC@Palisadesny.com.

Frohawk, artist and storyteller, paints and writes stories about battles, conquests, and the cast of characters that makes it all happen for his imaginary Republic of Frengland. In ink, acrylic, and tea, on paper and on canvas, Frohawk, born Umar Rashid in 1976, creates a fictional world that looks quite a bit like our real one.
This exhibition is the final episode in the artist's series on Colonial America, his successful combining of art, history, and sometimes wicked, but always fun-to-read, commentary on people — Europeans, adventurers, and explorers, North American Indians, freed and enslaved blacks, and ravishing women who love, laugh, and die on the banks of the Hudson from Manhattan up to Lake Oneida.
The action begins in 1791 and continues through 1793, real time for a New York City just flaunting its new identity on the southern tip of the island of Manhattan, and thriving under English rule. The city's first denizens, the Dutch, are "“has beens," unwillingly departed from the city they called New Amsterdam, and now skirmishing with their Iroquois allies in the Hudson Valley nearby to the north.
Real and not real, fact and fiction, Frengland (a combo of France, England, and Ireland) and Batavia (the Netherlands) fight the climactic Battle of Yonkers, recorded and viewed for the first time at the Hudson River Museum, situated by the river in the very countryside that inspired the 19th-century Hudson River School painters. The landscapes of three artists, Jasper Cropsey, Asher Durand, and James Renwick Brevoort, inspired Frohawk's scenic work for this exhibition, which also includes almost a dozen new pieces, among them The Battle of Yonkers and the Death of Iroquois Chief Joseph. Also new to Frohawk's story and the Hudson Valley is a Trojan Horse. Named for the war machine with which the ancient Greeks surprised the Trojans, Frohawk's horse holds some surprises of its own — it sports two heads and is filled with warriors from both sides of the quarrel. Glass figures, they are fragile and exhausted from the wars. The wooden horse soars 22 feet high in the center of the exhibition, and is illuminated from within. For Frohawk followers, favorite characters reappear, too, among them Bonnie Prince Johnnie and his flamboyant general Orlande, Duc du Rouen, who "amidst his sh*t-colored crew was a gilded peacock with sapphires for eyes."
Umar Rashid (Frohawk Two Feathers), an Illinois native who now lives and works in Los Angeles, California, first studied photography, film, and writing at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. His recent solo exhibitions include the Wadsworth Athenaeum (Hartford, CT), Wellin Museum of Art (Clinton, NY), the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey (Summit, NJ), the Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, NV), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver, CO).
The exhibition is organized by the Hudson River Museum and curated by its deputy director, Bartholomew F. Bland. Exhibition design is by Dillon Lundeen Goldschlag. The fully illustrated catalog that accompanies the exhibition explores Frohawk's work and contains the full narrative of this final episode, the fifth and last in his series "The American Proteus: An Invocation and the Wars Between the Rivers." Proteus, mythic Greek god of rivers and seas, is the name the artist has selected for his contemporary myth of the New World.

We look for our president in paintings, photographs, and sculpture, where we may see him as a warrior, family man, or a man of faith. Washington, the nation's first soldier and president, is the prototype for political promotion, too. For this exhibition, Gilbert Stuart's famous painting, George Washington, on loan to the museum, as well as the museum's collection of artifacts and engravings show this leader in images beautiful, respectful, and, sometimes, flamboyant, that were made to frame our vision of him and charge our patriotism and memories.
George Washington was painted three times by American painter Gilbert Stuart between 1775 and 1776. Everyone wanted a portrait of the hero of the American Revolution and Gilbert, himself, made rare copies of his second: The Atheneum portrait. All are treasured. One, at the museum for this exhibition, shows the president looking to the right out at the viewer, his left hand framed by a gilded arm rest.
Images of Washington often show him an elder statesman, bringing peace and stability to the new nation of the United States after the turmoil of its Revolutionary War. The Museum complements these images with early books and prints that illustrate his life in many aspects and the popular perceptions of him after his death. People tend to turn to Washington and look for his image during trying times such as Washington's own death in 1799 and during the Civil War in the 1860s, as well as in times of celebration at the centennial of the United States in 1876, and the bBicentennial of Washington's birth in 1932.
Promoting the President focuses on images of George Washington grouped in four themes: first, General-Hero: seen in a number of notable prints, including Alexander Campbell's 1777 George Washington General and Commander en Chief of the Continental Army in America; or General Washington, 1781, after John Trumbull; Memorials and Mementos: illustrated by Washington's Headquarters, a mid-19th century painting attributed to E.C. Coates, and on the covers of popular media in the 1930s that celebrated the bicentennial of Washington's birth in poster art and merchandising; third, Portraits: foremost the Gilbert Stuart painting as well as engravings such as the famous “Porthole” engraving from the Original painting of Washington from life by Rembrandt Peale, circa 1870; and, last, Washington as Man or Myth: illustrated here in the famous myth: "Father I Cannot Tell a Lie, I Cut the Tree," in the 1867 engraving by George White.
The successful visual promotion of Washington to his public was adopted by the presidents who followed, as they sought visual presence before the public. By Abraham Lincoln's time, from 1861 to 1865, photographs, like paintings less than a century before, became the vehicle for showing the president at work. Both leaders were continually linked together in the public's perception, as seen in a pair of 1860s engravings based on paintings by F.B. Schell: The Washington Family and The Lincoln Family. In each, the president is seated, his wife and children surrounding him, a grouping that reflects the 19th-century's idealization of domestic life and that society's desire to see its leaders as moral men. An 1865 Currier and Ives lithograph pictures Washington (The Father) and Lincoln (The Saviour) of the country.
The combination of the magnificent Gilbert Stuart loan with the art and popular culture collections from the museum's holdings tell much about how we view and remember historical figures. The exhibition is organized by the Hudson River Museum.

This Saturday morning service is geared towards families with children up to age 5. The program follows an interactive and musical format that encourages both children and adults to explore the spiritual aspects of Shabbat. Through June 27, 2015.

Join a museum educator to meet the live "animal of the week" each Saturday and Sunday. Families can learn characteristics of the animal and how it came to live at the nature center. Afterward, check out the nature center's current Mastodon and Brook Trout exhibits. Nature Center hours are Friday through Sunday, 12-4pm.

Bounce! Trampoline Sports has teamed up with Giant Leaps Occupational Therapy to offer a special evening for those with Sensory Processing Disorders and others with sensory challenges including those with Autism Spectrum Disorders. The program is geared toward children with sensory issues and those on the autism spectrum. The the hour-long program will include decreased auditory and visual stimuli in a less crowded environment, structured group activities with limited class size, and an available quiet room with sensory manipulatives. Family members or buddies are invited to participate with those who thrive with 1:1 assistance.

Stop by the store's children's department for weekly storytimes. This ongoing event is held every Wednesday morning and afternoon. Call the store for information about special holiday events or costume character appearances.

GUIDES TO OUR REGIONS

Rachel Simmons, co-founder of Girls Leadership, an organization that teaches girls how to empower themselves and cope with various challenges women face, answers a question submitted to Girls Leadership concerning relational aggression between elementary school friends, and what to do when girls use friendship as a weapon against each other.

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NYMetroParents is the parenting division of Davler Media Group and encompasses 9 regional print magazines within the greater NY metro region as well as the website (nymetroparents.com). Following the success of the first NYC parenting resource book, "Big Apple Baby," BIG APPLE PARENT was launched in 1985; it is now the largest publisher of regional parenting content in the United States.